The present invention relates to a copy machine of the type in which a document or documents of two picture frames are arranged on a document table.
A conventional copy machine treats one document or original on the document table as one picture frame and copies the document or original only one frame at a time. For this reason, in copying each page of a notebook on a copy sheet with the same size as that of the page, the notebook must be rearranged for every copying operation of one page. The repetition of this rearrangement is time-consuming and troublesome work. This arises from a structural feature essential to the conventional copy machine that has an optical system containing an exposure lamp, etc. which quickly returns to a scanning starting point after the optical system completes the scanning of one picture frame.
To cope with this problem, a new type of copy machine has recently been developed. In the copy machine, the optical system, after the completion of one picture frame scanning stays at the scanning end point rather than returning to the scanning starting point. Instead, the optical system starts from the scanning end point to start the next scanning operation of a second picture frame. In other words, a document having two picture frames can be arranged on the document table and copied at one time by the so-called two-time scanning method. This type of copy machine halves the time needed to arrange the document and improves copying efficiency. When the two picture frames consist of two separate documents, the documents are set side by side on the document table. In this case, however, even if these documents are well arranged, the space between them will appear as a black line or stripe in the copy image. Further, when a notebook is copied the seam line of the notebook is also copied as a black stripe.